Cloud Computing is surely a buzz word and is catching the IT industry slowly but surely. As part of my work, I do meet a lot of Indian customers asking for more when it comes to consuming and evaluating various Cloud implementation strategies. Yes, cost is one of the dimensions where this is evaluated, but the crux being – Have you designed for the cloud? I will spare that thought of designing for the cloud for a different discussion some other day. But let me call out some of the trends I am seeing and is worth investing our time when it comes to learning Cloud phenomenon in the coming year !!!

Cloud as Disaster Site

This is quite a viable option to think, as most companies are looking at options to get their online backups to the cloud as the storage costs are cheaper and available with redundancy on the cloud. The traditional method of using a DR site was only for business continuity and needed dedicated processes and replication infrastructure to be maintained at a different site. Not to add the human resources, electricity, A/C, infrastructure and more costs to maintain a dead weight. So this trend will become something to lookout for in the future especially when ingress traffic is at no cost from most cloud providers :).

Word of caution here would be – look at the SLA the cloud providers give you even with the storage. Given storage cheaper, just incase of disaster – look at the recovery time requirements that you have set with your customers. Having TB’s of backup will take some considerable time and don’t assume on your recovery strategy !!!

Enterprise moves with Hybrid-Private Cloud

More and more I get an opportunity to talk with the Enterprise CxO’s, I get to hear more of these terms coming up. Yes, the investments are already out there within the enterprises and these cannot go anywhere. So the need to use the existing storages and extend the future needs of storage to the cloud can be a viable option that exec’s always want to contemplate and discuss. The whole concept of limitless (based on costing) storage that hardly requires upgrades, replacements and with no additional capital investment means quite a lot to these CxO’s – especially the CFO’s love to see the ROI here.

Now that these decisions work, next is the need to seamlessly integrate your on-premise environments with the cloud infrastructure. This will become a critical part of any application designs moving forward. We cannot live in a Monolithic model moving forward – hybrid is here and there to stay for a long time.

With computing easy to get on the cloud, it is sometimes the storage that will need to transform from local storages to SAN to Private Cloud storages to Public Cloud storages. These are challenges to keep in mind but not far from implementation – get ready.

Bootstrap to Cloud

As more and more applications do get designed to move to the cloud, there are many more administrative tasks that organizations are contemplating to move to the cloud to reduce the maintenance overheads. The tools and steps required to migrate or move these applications will be something we need to aware and understand holistically. As IT Admins, the need to maintain VMs on the Public Cloud and keep them up-to-date and running is a trend not to miss. Yes, pure play cloud enabled apps are taking shape for newer applications but the legacy applications will stay, hence VMs might be something that cannot be avoided.

As much as applications migrate away from on-premise to cloud. Keep in mind the tools needed to bring them back to your environment anytime (if required).

Big Data – trends not to forget

As more and more people are getting stung with these industry phenomenon not very well understood implementations of NoSQL worlds, Non-relational databases – a trend that will hit the market sooner than later. Though I am a big relational DB fan for a long time, I can see it clearly the Big-Data story is something I will need to bite in the coming year without any doubt. Do we have a choice – Nope !!!

Conclusion

As 2012 nears, just like explained in “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore, the concepts of adoptions remain the same. There will be industry early adopters, others on the way to get themselves moved coming year and a vast majority still contemplating to move first in a sandwich mode with Private Cloud and then move slowly to the new era of completely public cloud infrastructures.

If you really ask me, there is more than what hits the eye and we will get a lot to learn as companies make these moves. There is anyways an opportunity in everything new that comes to the market and the phenomenon of Cloud is something to stay as we move into 2012 !!!

This entry was posted
on Monday, December 26th, 2011 at 10:17 and is filed under Technology.
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